On County Government’s Consultative Decision-Making Model In Livelihood Policy Making

People’s livelihood issues are related to the broad masses of the people’s vitalinterests, which have become the most important tasks of CPC and the government.Recently, people pay more and more attention to these five following issues: unevendistribution of education resources, growing income disparities, serious employmentand unemployment phenomenon, low level medical technology and unable universalsocial security. Reports of the18th National Congress of CPC point out five realisticproblems (education, employment, income, social security, health care) which aredirectly and closely related to the mass of people. They emphasize to "strive to satisfypeople with good education","promote higher quality employment","and doeverything possible to increase people’s income","improve the development of urbanand rural social security system as a whole" and "improve the health of the people".These encouraging and tangible measures highlight the concepts of governance("empower the rights to the people, gain interests for the people and love the people").Thus, the result of people’s livelihood policy making is not only related to theChairman Xi’s realization of “China dream “, but more related to the vital interests ofthe mass. However, the county government is a junction to connect the central andlocal government, the urban and rural, the macro-economy and micro-economy whichconnects the upstream and downstream organization. The county level governmentdecision-making has a direct relationship with the central, provincial and municipallevel’s implementation of routes, principles and policies and county socio-politicaland economic development as well which is of great practical significance forcounty’s whole development in urban and rural area and for the sustainabledevelopment of society. Since the reform and opening up of China, with the in-depthdevelopment of the socialist market economy, China’s society is experiencingprofound changes. The increasingly complex socio-economic as well as the constantlydifferentiation and reconstruction of the structure in the interests of the communitygreatly expand the county government’s administrative functions and scope and putforward higher requirements and challenges for the county-level government indecision-making. How to deal with a complex decision-making environment andpromote consultation decision model are two major issues the county governmentsneed to respond to.Deliberative democracy appeared in western political circles since the1990s. Intheory, it considers deliberative democracy is rehabilitation and development of democracy pattern, which is the result of study on the existing democratic system ofrepresentative democracy, and argument on democracy limited. We should promotetheir participation in public affairs actively. Value preferences based on democraticideals and the decision-making process and the system operation system caused by itare called consultative decision-making model. Consultative decision-making modelemphasizes on multi-party negotiation as the basic form in decision-making andabsorb policy makers in relevant interest groups into government decision-making.Through the equal exchange of information and consultation, it gets consensus andsafeguard the public interests. So there is no doubt that to introduce consultativedecision-making model and applied it to the county government in livelihoodpolicymaking is meaningful in both theoretical and realistic level.Based on the above understanding, the research structure in this paper containsfour major parts. The first part explains the related theories of county government andpolicy-making in people’s livelihood. Meanwhile, it analyzes the main types of policymaking model. The second part explains the connotation and manifestations of thedecision-making mode. It mainly analyzes the several forms to apply consultativedecision-making model in county government’s livelihood policy makings. The thirdpart uses empirical analysis methods to analyze the example of "7.28" event ofQidong county government in Jiangsu province and discuss the reasons for the lack ofconsultation decision model in current county governments livelihood policymakingto determine the ideas in this paper. Based on this theory, the fourth part explores thecounty government livelihood policy making’s optimal paths with a broad view andmulti-angle to discuss the operational proposals.